Once Upon A Time: A Sherlock Fairytale
by The Original Geek
Summary: Once upon a time there were two lonely men... a Sherlock fairytale, and an exercise in...something. Not slash.


A/N: This is an experiment in...somthing. I'm not entirely sure what. As an aside, I haven't seen the S2 finale yet, so any references to that are based on things I've heard and read in other people's stories. Reviews and ConCrit welcome - let me know what you think.

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Once upon a time (for that is how all good fairytales ought to begin) there were two lonely men who knew nothing of each other or the destiny they were to share.

The first man knew he was lonely, but had no clue how to remedy it. He had been a warrior and a healer in another lifetime, fighting an epic crusade in a far-off land, but now that he was back in his home kingdom he didn't know how to fit in anywhere anymore. He bore the scars of his battle both within and without, and this added to his loneliness as few were willing to look beyond those scars. His sleeping hours were tormented by demons from that other life, demons that carried with them noise and fear and heat. And pain, always pain. Pain was the one constant in the warrior's life, there day and night. The demons he tried to fight while sleeping gleefully gave way to new ones when he was awake; demons that mocked him with whispers that carried words of despair and depression and uselessness.

The warrior visited a not-so-wise woman on the command of his former liege and she told him that chronicling his days would lift the spell and free him from the demons; instead, it only made their grip stronger. And then he met the second man.

The second man didn't know he was lonely; in fact, he couldn't even grasp the concept of loneliness. He was a seer, blessed (or cursed, some said) with the gift of observation. He saw what others didn't or couldn't and his mind made connections out of what he saw as easily as a child connects building blocks.

The seer's gift came with a price, though. While he saw what others didn't, he was often blinded to the conventions that almost everyone else knew. This was, in part, due to his gift and, in part, his upbringing. Although the seer had been raised in this realm, his had been a solitary existence. His gift made him difficult to know and difficult to like and so he had never learned what it was to be human.

Because he didn't know what it was to be human, the seer was hated and feared by the band of knights charged with protecting the realm in which he lived, although they would never admit the latter emotion, even to themselves. The chief knight amongst them, however, neither hated nor feared the seer. He recognised the seer for what he could be – a tool the knight could use to protect those in his realm and to bring to justice those who sought to wrong them.

The knight was wise enough, though, to realise that the seer was a capricious and unpredictable imp and he spent much of their time together cursing the seer and trying to keep him from falling under the siren song of his observations, the song that made him forget (or ignore) that he was in service to the knights. This knight also spent much of his time protecting the seer from the taunts and insults hurled at him by the other knights as he strode onto their battlefield, his cloak swirling about him like a cloud of inky blackness.

And then the warrior and the seer met, brought face to face by a servant of Fate, and everything changed. It was as if each one brought the other something that had been missing before.

The warrior became a bard, weaving stories of the seer's (and his, although he was loathe to admit it) quests for audiences near and far and, in doing so, found purpose and meaning in his life once again. The seer, in return, found his eyes opened to those things he had been blinded to before. The warrior understood the seer as no one had before and the seer basked in that understanding, realising for the first time in his life what loneliness was now that he was no longer cursed by it. And, as the warrior began to put expectations upon the seer's head, the seer found he wanted to meet those expectations rather than shying away from them as he had from others in the past.

The chief knight of the realm found that his life was easier once the warrior and the seer embraced their destiny, as the warrior tempered the seer's edge, the way a blacksmith tempers fine steel. What was already a brilliant weapon became even more with the addition of the warrior's hands. The warrior also protected the seer on their quests in service to the realm and to those who had heard his tales, sometimes to the detriment of his own wellbeing, and the seer began to understand the concepts of sacrifice and friendship.

There came a time when the seer and the warrior faced a great enemy, a sorcerer who had taken an unhealthy interest in the seer and it was as if he'd cast a spell upon the seer. The warrior feared that he was losing the seer as he was drawn further and further into the sorcerer's game, and didn't know how to break the spell. Then the warrior was taken by the sorcerer to be used as a pawn in his game and the scales fell away from the seer's eyes as he realised what the sorcerer was and what he stood to lose. The warrior once again offered himself up to save the seer, but the seer was having none of it, finally realising that if he were to lose the warrior it would be like losing a part of himself. And so there was a standoff, until the sorcerer disappeared in a flash, leaving the warrior and seer to fight another day.

But not all fairytales end happily ever after, and one day the seer and the sorcerer battled each other again atop a high castle wall. The warrior saw the seer fall from grace, both figuratively and literally, and was himself undone. And in the weeks that followed the warrior clung to one thought even as he descended further into despair. Perhaps like another hero of legend (for that is how the warrior saw the seer, despite the seer's protests that there were no such beings) the seer, mortally wounded, had been spirited far away and even now slumbered, waiting for his realm to need him again.

The End


End file.
